Spanish Class Charade Catastrophe
Not everyone likes how I teach. Students usually love it, but the language coordinators I’ve worked with, they are another story.
Once when I was teaching English in Mexico the coordinator came into my classroom to show me how it was done.
A student asked me the meaning of an English word.
I was about to give him the translation when the coordinator jumped in and took over my class.
We then went through 5 minutes of craziness. It was somewhere between a circus, a pantomime and a vaudeville act.
She mimed. She used hand signals. She acted.
Yet, as I looked around the room all I saw was blank stares. I look back at the coordinator and she’s still going on with the show.
By now she’s practically doing hand stands and juggling. Then about 5 minutes into the festivities, she starts using the word in a sentence.
Now the students are guessing the meaning, but they still they can’t figure it out.
Finally someone yells out the word in Spanish. The coordinator points to them with a big smile and says…
Sí, eso es. – Yes, that’s it
The whole circus act was supposedly so we didn’t use Spanish in the classroom, yet the student translated into Spanish and the coordinator answered in Spanish.
Why didn’t she just translate it in the first place?
Solo Dios sabe! (God alone knows!)
I’m not sure what it is about foreign language teaching, but people come up with the goofiest ideas. They either seem to think you have to pound students with grammar or entertain them with games.
Yet, expressing yourself freely in another language is entertaining enough. No one needs the sideshow.
It’s thrilling when you discover you can say what you want to say in Spanish. And it’s exhilarating when you try it in real life on Spanish speakers and they get what you say right away.
I’ve haven’t found a faster way for you to experience sensation of success with Spanish than learning the most powerful Spanish patterns first. They open up the language for you. In fact, there are a handful of patterns so powerful that just 138 words can be turned into 88,0000 phrases.
My advice is to forget the grammar, forget the charades and get your Spanish started with power patterns first.
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